Women – as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women,even absent women – haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting: their representation is one of its most common subjects.

Representing Women brings together Linda Nochlin’s most important writings on the subject, as she considers work by Miller, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among many others. In her riveting, partly autobiographical, extended introduction, Nochlin documents her own pioneering approach to art history; throughout the seven essays in this book, she argues for the honest virtues of an art history that rejects methodological assumptions, and for art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Memoirs of an Ad Hoc Art Historian • 1. The Myth of the Woman Warrior • 2. Géricault: The Absence of Women • 3. The Image of the Working Woman • 4. Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading The Painter’s Studio • 5. A House Is Not a Home: Degas and the Subversion of the Family • 6. Mary Cassatt’s Modernity • 7. Body Politics: Seurat’s Poseuses

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About the Author

Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) was Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. She wrote extensively on issues of gender in art history and on 19th-century Realism. Her numerous publications include Women, Art and Power, Representing Women and Courbet, as well as the pioneering essay from 1971: `Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?'

Overall, this book is very informative. As good as it is, the thing I kept getting hung up on was the very verbose way in which Nochlin had to emphasize and re-emphasize every point. At times it felt like she opened up a thesaurus and changed out the common sense words with $25 words. I definitely have a different view of the feminist art movement.